Ascent Trip Report

My wife joined me for this one. We ran into snow on the north side of a hill on the approach road and decided not to tempt fate even with the 4Runner in low range 4WD. So we had to walk from there, not far happily. But for some reason I lost track of my attack plan for this one, and we wound up ascending the south ridge instead of following the road around to the north side. It would have been easy going except that the brush was pretty dense and even though there was no foliage, there were lots of snapping branches. This was not Rhonda's usual experience, so I was taking it slow and helping her with the harder spots. Suffice it to say that it would have been MUCH easier if we had walked the road around to the north and approached the two 3400-foot contours from there. The trees were tall and dense in the western closed contour, but the eastern one was in clear-cut terrain and rather easily accessed due to snow that had accumulated in the open terrain. After bagging each contour we headed north from the western one and found the road. No big brush problem on the north side, and the road could easily have been driven clear to where we found it if it hadn't been for the snow.